In a shocking decision, the BC Supreme Court has stayed murder and conspiracy charges against notorious gangster Jamie Bacon. The charges were laid following six murders: known as the Surrey Six, a case described drug turf dispute that went wrong and resulted in multiple innocents being executed.
Steele and Drex: What was your reaction when you first heard this today?
Paul Doroshenko: It’s shocking… It was stayed for a much more unusual reason than you’d expect. It appears to be a violation of what we call litigation privilege. Some information came out that was released to one party or another that they shouldn’t have. It appears to be when you look at the very brief decision, something to do with an informer. And as a result of that, litigation privilege being breached, the court has decided the only remedy possible, unfortunately the only remedy possible, to stay the charges.
Steele and Drex: When would this have happened do you think?
Paul Doroshenko: You have no idea. The argument could have been made months and months ago when this thing first started to have applications in court and it might just be now that the judge made the decision. If you look at the decision its deliberately cryptic, it almost tells you nothing and the court is stuck with doing it that way because it’s all about information that’s not supposed to be released. Its privileged and confidential information.
You got two types of privilege. One is solicitor client privilege, between an individual and their lawyer. Then there’s privilege created over the course of the litigation, so in the course of the prosecution. And this looking at the decision would be privilege related to some confidential informer. The court considers this very serious because you don’t want people put at risk. You want people to step forward and be informers when necessary.
Steele and Drex: Would this have been an error on the prosecution’s part then?
Paul Doroshenko: Well you get that sense. It looks like its some major failure. We’ve heard about some of these other major failures in this investigation, which is tragic, as a result of basically police screw ups we see this go this way and take this long. This can be prosecution, this can be police, and we’ll probably never know.
Steele and Drex: Why not?
Paul Doroshenko: If you look at the decision the court says look I can’t tell you. The judge says I’d love to be able to explain it, it sort of implies that, we have a few things that are crucial legal principles that we have to hold onto to have our justice system function. One of them is that ultimate privilege between solicitor client or during ht course of litigation.
Steele and Drex: Is this the kind of thing that can go wrong when something takes 10 years to go to trial?
Paul Doroshenko: I thin the likelihood increases when the longer it goes on. The likelihood of screw ups and something disclosed when it shouldn’t be. It’s really unfortunate when you’re looking at this and wondering how the hell could this happen.
Steele and Drex: What about the victims families do they not have a right to know what happened here?
Paul Doroshenko: They’ll never know. They probably have a little bit more detail than we’ll ever have. I’m sure the prosecution is explaining something, I understand that there will be some statement made by the prosecution service about it. But there’s going to be limits about what they can say.
Steele and Drex: Is there a recourse, is there somewhere else you can go to appeal anything?
Paul Doroshenko: The decision might be appealed to the BC Court of Appeal and it might go to the Supreme Court of Canada. Those types of cases unfortunately are the ones that end up going because there’s huge motivation to appeal it. they’re not always the best cases to go to the appellate court or the Supreme Court of Canada, but those are the types of cases that go there.
Steele and Drex: When charges are stayed they can be brought back can they not?
Paul Doroshenko: That’s judicial stay. So it would have to be an appeal. When it’s stayed by the Crown, when the prosecution looks at it and says I’m going just withdraw this charge, because it no longer is tenable there’s no longer a likelihood of successful prosecution. If the Crown makes that decision and something changes, they can bring it back in certain circumstances.
This is a decision by the court, the court has ordered these charges stayed. Once at that point, the court is done with it, its just a matter of whether it can be brought back because of an appeal.
Listen to the full interview with Paul Doroshenko on Steel and Drex: